Bottom Lines and Better Lives: How Public-Private Partnerships Can Make a Difference for Women and Girls
In Saudi Arabia, where more than half of college graduates are women, the workforce remains dominated by men. U.S. companies are playing an important role in increasing women’s workforce participation.
When I traveled to Riyadh last year, I talked with many people about the challenges facing women who want to enter the economy. A group of young women who work at a business center told me about their families’ support and spoke of gradual change in their society.
While the Saudi government is a key leader in ushering that change, there’s no doubt that the private sector also plays a critical role.
A few years ago, GE Saudi joined with state-owned Saudi Aramco and Tata Consulting to open the country’s first all-women business process center. Today, it is a major hub, where 1,000 women work to support GE’s worldwide operations. The center, which I visited, hopes to grow to 3,000 employees in the coming years.
(Earlier this month, GE Saudi Arabia won the Secretary of State’s Award for Corporate Excellence in Inclusive Hiring Practices for exemplifying how the company implements its responsible business conducts practices overseas.)
The center is a prime example of something I see around the world: when women do better, so does everyone else, including communities, companies, and economies.
But the center also illustrates how the public and private sectors can come together to increase bottom lines — countries can grow their GDP by expanding the number of women in the workforce, while companies can expand their talent pools through inclusive hiring practices — in a way that changes the world for the better.
I’ve seen this in my nearly four years at the State Department, where we’ve built strong partnerships with the private sector to increase economic opportunities for women.
Here are just four of the many goals we’ve accomplished together.
1. Expand women’s access to capital.
Last year, we announced that the State Department and Kiva.org are working to expand access to capital for one million women entrepreneurs in 83 countries through the Women’s Entrepreneurship Fund.
Here’s how it works: When lenders respond to a woman entrepreneur’s loan request on Kiva’s online platform, the Fund will match the crowdfunder dollar for dollar, leveraging contributions from corporations, multilateral groups, and private philanthropy.
As part of the Fund, the Department is supporting data collection and analysis to measure effective approaches to expanding women’s access to finance. The lessons learned will inform the Department and other private sector-led initiatives to support women entrepreneurs.
2. Protect and expand artisan businesses.
Through the Alliance for Artisan Enterprise public-private partnership, the Department is working with 125 artisan businesses, artisan support organizations, corporations, foundations, government and multilateral agencies, and individuals to support the full potential of the $32 billion artisan sector around the world.
Recently, the Alliance launched the Artisan Innovation Workshop, a tool to address barriers artisans face in the process to source, create and bring products to market.
By bringing together stakeholders from across the value chain, this model creates the kind of collaboration and creativity that we need to find real, tangible solutions for local artisan businesses. In the short term, artisans are able to connect directly with buyers and prepare their businesses to enter new markets.
The Alliance is also driving change on a broader level. Combining insight from artisan cooperatives, private sector training on industry standards, and diplomatic platforms, we are identifying gaps and trends. The multi-faceted approach leverages each member organization’s respective resources and tools, allowing the U.S. government, along with the Alliance, to bring our full collective weight to bear to elevate the global artisan sector in a way that no one member could achieve alone.
3. Promote best practices for increasing women’s participation.
Private sector participation is central to our efforts to increase women’s economic participation through the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Policy Partnership on Women and the Economy.
For example, Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany helped launch the APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies initiative, a public-private partnership that is working to advance women’s health and well-being to increase their economic participation.
Through this initiative, governments and private industry joined together to develop a policy toolkit that outlines how to break down health-related barriers to women’s economic participation.
Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany is one of the many private sector partners that have helped lead APEC initiatives to increase women’s roles in economies during the past 5 years. Their participation demonstrates the “business case” for why women’s participation matters, and they inspire others across the Asia Pacific region to adopt similar gender-sensitive policies to increase women’s participation in the workforce.
4. Invest in the next generation by focusing on adolescent girls.
With an interest in supporting their employees and the communities in which they operate, companies have joined the U.S. government in tackling a looming issue: the 98 million adolescent girls who are not in school and the 250 million living in poverty.
We’ve seen the value in cross-sector cooperation in Malawi, where we are coordinating public and private efforts to take a comprehensive approach to empowering adolescent girls.
In July 2017, we’ll hold a STEAM camp for girls in Malawi to encourage their participation in the STEAM fields of science, technology, engineering, arts and design, and mathematics.
The camp is a public-private partnership between the Department, UN Foundation’s Girl UP, and companies including the Intel Corporation and Google. Corporate volunteers will provide innovative hands on training and mentorship to prepare the girls for the future workforce and to challenge them to think creatively about applying STEAM skills to improve their communities.
All of this work reflects the U.S. commitment to gender equality, as well as the unique position of the private sector to support and advance gender equality globally.
The examples of cross-sector collaboration I’ve mentioned here are only the start of the tremendous opportunity for government and the private sector to work together on these issues.
This work will continue. At a recent roundtable with members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, I was impressed and humbled by the private sector’s commitment and leadership on women’s issues. I know they — and others — will continue to be a strong voice in articulating why these issues matter.
There’s little to lose and much to gain.
